From the Trenches

Matching your Branding to your Content

2009-01-28T18:13:00Z

Google any form of the word “paintball” and a host of results will bring you the many aspects of this hobby/sport. Paintball is an activity that requires a large amount of specialized gear not easily found in local stores. The paintball enthusiast can find just about any piece of equipment he/she needs online at retailers like Compulsive Paintball.

Compulsive Paintball, like many other online options, offers a host of specialized items for the weekend warrior and paintball devotee. The problem for Compulsive Paintball is just that: the vast availability of purchasing options online. To set themselves apart from the myriad of other retailers selling the very same items online they must create a website with a look and feel that brands them as the premier retailer of online paintball equipment.

The Compulsive Paintball website is not lacking in content or buying options. The site feels organized in a way that makes it easy for users to access gear for purchase and read product descriptions. What is lacking in the buying experience for Compulsive Paintball is that the site seems devoid of community. The core group of paintball fans makeup a very specialized group of people that could offer advice and experience to newcomers on everything from good locations to play to what equipment to buy.

Compulsive Paintball is missing a huge opportunity in not having a message board area to build ties between users, encourage more product reviews and partner with local paintball locations for advertising revenue. The products offered are diverse and affordable but how would a newcomer know what to start with without a little guidance? Because most users are not going to a physical storefront to get direction on what gear to purchase, the site could capitalize on this need to provide how-to information.

Functionally the site works well. It’s easy to use and intuitive, but the feel of the site seems outdated. The stylized header image gives a strong impression of what the store is about, but does not match the soft rounded edges that tie it off, or the soft colors of the background. The header feels disconnected from the rest of the site while still being its strongest design element. Why not integrate some of those textures into the background of the site?

The use of light tan also seems incongruent to the site’s message and to other paintball sites online. The vast majority of competing sites use darker colors like grays and blacks. Compulsive Paintball integrates some of that feeling into their header image but not throughout the rest of the site. The site feels like two separate entities, with the header seeming rough, textured and refined while the rest of the site seems soft, unrefined and amateurish.

Compulsive Paintball has an incredible amount of products to offer. The navigation is clear and easy to use but under designed. It lacks creative use of fonts and rollovers to enhance the look and feel and give it a sense of being branded. The site is missing out on a critical opportunity to create a community of users that return not only for gear, but also for information sharing, reviews and interaction.

The site could be considerably improved with streamlined top navigation that includes:

Home
About Us
Store
Community
Blog
Contact

A cleaner homepage design with stronger imagery and a call to action would create a destination that users would come to not only for purchases but also for interaction and information. While the website does have a blog, it is disconnected from the site and hosted elsewhere, leaving the user separated from the store, having to hit the back button to return. That kind of usability will lose sales and create confusion for users who aren’t web savvy. A more integrated blog and community will keep users on the same site, buying and sharing information.

Compulsive Paintball suffers from a disjointed design, lack of branding, and a homegrown feeling website. They’re half way there: the header image shows promise and a sense of what the site really should be. Unfortunately that’s where the branding and design ends for this website.

Missed ad revenue from local paintball locations and missed opportunity in creating a web community for paintball enthusiasts is keeping this site from reaching its full potential. A little attention to branding, interface design, information architecture and engineering could jump this site to forefront of a growing community.

About Lauren Razzore

Assistant Professor, Art Department, William Paterson University
Bayside, NY, USA

Professor Lauren Razzore is a web designer, animator, and graphic designer who has taught in the Art Department of William Paterson University since the spring of 2006. She specializes in entertainment, sports and kids' design, working mainly as a web designer and flash animator.

Professor Razzore graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1998. In 2004, she received her M.S. in Communications and Packaging Design with a concentration in Digital Media from Pratt Institute. She spent 10 years working as graphic designer before transitioning into web design and animation. Professor Razzore has worked for several large-scale companies such as Lycos and The Topps Company as the lead web designer and continues to do many freelance projects for high profile websites and animation clients. Professor Razzore's work can be seen in various places on the web, including www.topps.com, www.garbagepailkids.com, www.hollywoodzombies.com, www.wackypackages.com, www.topps.cardclub.com, www.bazookajoe.com and www.lycos.com.

Making the case for redesign: Cutting edge technology deserves a cutting edge web presence

2009-01-28T16:07:00Z

The alternate energy business is booming despite the fact that gas and oil prices are going down. People are still seeking out new ways to create cheaper, cleaner energy. The recent astronomical spike in gas prices hit customers hard and got them thinking about new ways to power their lives. As a result, new sources for environmentally friendly energy products have shown up online. One such website is AltE, a company and website committed to making and creating products that promote and provide renewable energy.

The Alt-e website offers an alternative energy store as well as a learning center and community. All three pieces are critical to the idea of creating a new energy web portal. Users learn about products before they buy them, read reviews and have a place to purchase goods, encouraging customers to return to learn, share and buy again.

The model and content for the site is solid and the products offered are diverse and affordable. The site lets the environmental enthusiast buy hard to find tools for energy efficiency and offers them the tools necessary to learn how to self install and review products. These goods are not often found in your local hardware store and are not simple to install, so a web store that provides how-to information and a place to purchase is the logical location for this type of business.

If you are new to alternative energy the community and blogs offer a great wealth of information from people who have been through the process of using these products and also gives insight into how to go about getting these products installed. There is a base of users that offer comments and reviews on both the blog posts and the products themselves.

The best features of the website are the Alt-e university and community categories. It offers hands-on advice and information from real users so that newcomers can relate and interact. The opportunity to take webinars and classes as well as search the online library makes the site interactive and rewarding.

The site itself is a wealth of knowledge. No one can argue that the pieces are all there for Alt-e to take off as a portal for learning, buying and sharing alternative energy products and ideas.

So what’s holding it back from jumping to the next level?

If you judged the site by its design alone you would see that this cutting edge community does not have a look and feel to match. The site seems homegrown; from the colors to the typography there is a distinct lack of design.The site tries hard to make it easier for the user to get around, search the site and explore by adding an abundance of links, but it doesn’t take into account that a streamlined site is easy on the eye and will enhance and encourage users to return. More attention to quality navigation rather than a quantity of links would better serve Alt-e’s website.

The overall layout of the site doesn’t take into account issues like usability and user interface design and doesn’t optimize the most important spaces for user interaction. A lot of the most important details on the site are buried below the fold where users have to scroll to find them instead of taking advantage of the unused space at the top.

The homepage, once navigated away from, is hard to return to. The site would be vastly improved with a change as simple as a navigation bar that included: Home, Store, University, Community, Blog and Contact. Even the naming structure of the website seems complicated, with the page name coming before the actual website name making it seem like they are different websites altogether.

Overall this site deserves better. All the pieces of the puzzle are in place - the information, the products, and the community. Users are involved and excited. Doesn’t AltE deserve a cleaner, more advanced feeling interface on the web - one that matches its mission and product lines and delivers the information in an easy streamlined way?

AltE is a company on the cutting edge with a website stuck in the past. If it takes the time to work on the interface design and information architecture of its web presence it is poised to capitalize on a growing industry. I look forward to seeing this industry and this website grow to its full potential. All it needs is a good design team.

About Lauren Razzore

Assistant Professor, Art Department, William Paterson University
Bayside, NY, USA

Leveraging Social Media and SEO to Launch Your Small Website: PPCForHire.com

2008-07-21T11:40:00Z

Jon Lee Clark is a talented SEO professional who used his personal search engine marketing business website, PPCForHire.com to get clients, broaden his portfolio and for some valuable SEO and SEM strategy experiments. Not every business needs reams of traffic to have a great impact on their business - and in many cases we try things just for the sake of trying them and end up having the greatest success.

When did you launch the business?

I launched the business in August of 2007. I wanted to learn web design and was messing around with HTML and CSS and working with web templates. I realized, if I'm going to be spending all this time learning I may as well put my 'learning curve' to good use. So I purchased a number of domain names and decided on ppcforhire.com as the one I would build and also test and learn SEO techniques to drive traffic and get 'free' leads via the Internet.

At the time the agency i worked for was heavily into real estate clientele and i wanted a more broad portfolio - which was another reason for attempting to build a small personal book of clients.

Is the website your primary means of attracting clients?

When I initially launched the site, it was brand new (obviously) and took time to gain any type of organic rankings. I didn't have the money to put toward paid search campaigns either. I utilized Craig's List initially to pull in my first few clients. From there my SEO began to take hold, I worked very hard at building links and now get the majority of my business through referrals and traditional marketing agency partnerships.

How did you start driving traffic to the site?

I dove headlong into the social media arena - in my profiles I included links back to PPC For hire. I scowered yahoo Answers for questions related to my profession and drove traffic that way as well.

Stumble Upon was a great way to send some quick spikes in traffic as well, however it wasn't very sustainable.

My big break came when after a blog comment, I was picked up in an article on Internet marketing tools.

The article drove almost 150 visits alone that month (January I believe) and provided a number of links. My idea in providing tools on the page was for exactly that reason. It worked out even better than I could have imagined!

Did you yourself use Pay Per Click?

As I mentioned above, I didn't have the funds to put toward it myself BUT I had attended SES in San Jose just as I was recently releasing my site. In the exhibit hall I grabbed all kinds of goodies - the most important? Between $50 - $100 free trials for yahoo, Google, MSN, Looksmart and Ask!

Up to that point I had never used the latter two so it ended up not only being a great way to speed up the indexing of my new site (Google crawls any page you are sending Paid traffic for relevancy & Google Quality Score) but also to gain experience in some 3rd tier engines setup and results - it was glaringly obvious why they are 3rd tier!

What are your plans for the site moving forward?

I plan on continuing to learn with it first off (testing new SEO tactics and improving on others) and also continuing to build out new pages - Certified Adwords Professional Profile; Yahoo Ambassador; Case Studies; etc. The biggest plan is a site blog, however, I'm too busy at the moment to take the time to set it up!

From Manufacturer to eTailer: Calliope Designs

2008-05-27T03:36:00Z

CalliopeDesigns.com is a great example of a single channel e-tailer out on the web. Not only do they serve their business to business clients, but they are growing a healthy direct consumer base as well. Having been in the gift business for over 30 years, Calliope's owners Stephanie and Dorr Eddy have watched the small business ecosystem evolve over time. Securing an early web presence was key - as was choosing a platform that got them up and running quickly.

Tell us about your business - when you started and why.

Our business wasn't really a "business" when we started - it was a way to make a little extra money and finance our youthful hobby of world travel! In 1972 two very talented department store buyers - one from Neiman Marcus and one from Macy's New York -watched as customers were crowding around our stand at a local Renaissance Faire where we were selling our handcrafted dough Christmas ornaments like crazy! They approached us with an interest in including our products in their holiday selection, and almost overnight we were a part of the retail gift industry.

Remember, this was the time of a revival of interest in crafts, and all things hand made. We went from being craftspeople to being manufacturers and distributors of our charming little products and personalized Christmas ornaments. Over the years we've added many fine gift shops and department stores to our customer base, and we continue today, 36 years later, to support ourselves and our family and actually occasionally enjoy some of the travel we did in our youth!

When did you launch your web presence? What prompted you to launch the site?

We developed an information only website in 2001 so that our wholesale customers could easily find our contact information and to attract new gift shops and department stores. In 2004 we launched our current site, www.calliopedesigns.com, as a retail website selling to our existing retail customers all over the world.

What technology, code and platforms have you used throughout the process?

We use Storefront 7.0 shopping cart software.

How did it help your business initially? Not sure if you mean the technology? Or having a website?

The technology: Using the shopping cart software allowed us to be up and running with a secure site almost immediately.

Having a website has brought us a lot of attention from potential wholesale customers. In fact we get more inquiries from exposure to our website than we do from expensive magazine advertisements! On a retail level, the website as greatly increased our company revenues!

What are you immediate goals for the future?

Our immediate goals are to continue to grow the website business through new product development, web optimization, and various other promotional tools. We would like to learn more about social network marketing and how that could contribute to our growth. We are always thinking about 3-5 years down the line and planning for what's coming around the corner. Any ideas???

How does it help your B2B customers vs. your B2C customers?

The website has been a surprisingly effective in attracting new wholesale customers as well as direct retail customers.

What have been your biggest challenges?

Keeping up with the rapid evolution of web optimization. Trying to use good solid optimization techniques and balance that with the goals of competition for those high ranking results in the search engine indexes. Luckily I have some really great help!

Starting From Scratch: Woopsie Baby

2008-05-06T17:36:00Z

One of the most compelling stories on the web is the individual who starts out selling their wares online out of necessity. A few years ago, everyone thought they could just slap up a website and be successful - there aren't many stories about the learning curve and what it really takes to not only make and manage the creation of the products and the code and technology associated with selling those products on the web.

Karen Hatch, the owner and operator of Woopsie Baby did just that in 2003. She needed a portal to sell her personalized baby gifts and she knew she could figure out enough html to be dangerous. She has managed to also develop business to business relationships with several retailers.

What made you launch your web store?

Desperation.

When my daughter was born early on in our marriage, my husband was still completing his medical training. Both principle and logic dictated that I stay home to care for our child: my teacher's salary covered only day care, with nothing left over for living expenses. As I began to make handmade items for my baby, people began to ask where I'd bought them. The notion that the products were marketable prompted me to pursue the impossible dream - working at home.

How are you choosing your platform and shopping cart?

I chose my platform through a google search. In early 2003, while completing the preliminary research on running an online business, a friend mentioned that she'd found web hosting for $7.95 per month. I googled "web host $7.95" and found ipower.com.

At first I chose the simple Paypal cart. I was teaching myself HTML at the time and its platform was easiest for me to install. However, given the number of options that I needed to give my customers, it soon became unwieldy. As my HTML and scripting skills grew, I was able to switch to a shopping cart hosted by mals-e.com. It allowed me to write my own form, but it takes care of all the secure back-end stuff.

How did you begin marketing your business?

The first step after launching the site was to register the site in the DMOZ. I knew enough about online shopping that search engines were the way to go, so each of my original pages had a meta tag of for keywords. Beyond that, I hoped that the google spiders would do their work.

While installing my hand-coded site on ipower.com, there was coupon available for ipower customers to use Google AdWords. It was my first foray into web marketing, and I discovered it to be largely useless unless I was targeting very, very specific keywords. For example, "baby gift" got me nowhere. But while trying to offload some unpopular rainbow ribbon, I registered an AdWord campaign for "LGBT adoption gift." My personalized rainbow-ribboned burp cloths were sold-out within two days. Given that few of the products could be marketed in such specific ways, I made the decision that AdWords were too costly for the return.

How have you managed growth? Do you plan to grow?

Growth is tricky for a one-woman show. There's only so much business I can handle while staying home to care for children. Depending on Google to do its job, I used the advice of a good friend {hi Blair!} and arranged the text on my pages to promote the search engine rankings of some very specific key word phrases. You won't find me searching for a "personalized baby gift," but you'll find me quickly if you're searching for a "personalized security blanket." It makes sense for my customers and for me: last week I had only 366 total page views, but I made 10 sales. That's a conversion rate that I can handle.

What are the best things you've done and the best learning experiences (some call them mistakes) that you feel you've made and learned from?

The best thing I've done is to take it slow. I've seen many other moms develop great home-grown products, but they lack the patience to stay in the game or fall apart while sorting out how to develop their sales platform. After taking six months to source the best materials for my products and teach myself HTML, I made $600 my first year in business. However, every year that I kept plugging away at it, my business first doubled, then tripled. We're now into five figures, which seems like small potatoes. But for my family, while my husband worked at completing his degrees, it meant student loan payments and groceries.

I think that understanding the "small" in small business helped keep me on track, especially when it came to SEO. Trying to achieve a high-ranking on a keyword like "baby gift" could bankrupt me, as well as bring me more business than I can handle on my own. Using organic SEO to target successful rankings on highly targeted keyword phrases brings me only customers who want what I sell. That took patience, too. Once I understood how to best manipulate my content for better rankings, it took close to six months to see my page ranks move, but once they did, business improved dramatically.

It also made sense financially. This business operates with very little capital investment, so learning to manipulate my own code and content to suit Google took time, but paid off in the end. Learning to write and maintain my own code has sometimes been painful, but well worth the trouble. I can tweak my own meta tags, revise my own content, and de-bug my own shopping cart. Not to mention how cheap it is: I pay for my host, my raw materials, and that's it.

Undoubtedly, there are drawbacks to managing every aspect of the business myself. While producing products, revisions and updates to my site often languish. I get way behind entering sales into my Quickbooks software. I have sometimes had more business than I can handle, and my family life has suffered for it. But I wouldn't change it.

I have some serious control issues, so knowing how to do all of it suits me.

Managing The Transition from Bricks to Bricks and Clicks: Inspirit Common

2008-05-06T16:48:00Z

We sat down with Emily and Bucky Sparkle, the owners and operators of Inspirit Common to discuss the nature of their hybrid business and their decision to explore going from a brick and mortar business to a Bricks and Clicks business model - incorporating a web store in their already existing business.

About Inspirit Common

Inspirit Common is more than a metaphysical supply store. It's a veritable playground for seekers who are searching for something different from their shopping experience. Our serene shop is full of gifts with intention and everyday, practical tools for spiritual growth. Just entering the store gives most people a feeling of calm centeredness. Though we have thousands of items in stock, our merchandise is carefully selected by our buyers. We value locally produced wares and artful objects of high quality.

What made you start your brick and mortar presence?

After working in the corporate world for a combined 23 years, my partner and I decided it was time to do something different. He was a civil engineer with a new MBA and studying to be a yoga instructor. I was a creative-corporate-marketing-type who worked for a mind-body-spirit center on the weekends. The shop I worked in was in the process of closing, and we often fantasized we could create a center just like it based on a participatory model inspired by Burning Man. In April of 2004, I had one of those incredible medical experiences that makes you re-examine your life. It was clear to me that I could no longer sit behind a desk. By April of 2005 we were working on papers of incorporation, creating capital from a real estate sale on the good side of housing bubble. and planning our first buying trip.

Maya's Dream, the center that my shop was inspired by, was a respite for me when I was searching and finding my spiritual path. I learned so much there about alternative paths to the Divine and the magnificence of Mother Earth and the overlaps of the stories in ancient religions and neo-pagan tribes. I was drawn to elements of Goddess Spirituality, Bhuddism, Shamanism, Magic(k), Crystals and pretty much everything I learned about. In our business, we really want to provide that experience for others. So many people are searching for gentle alternatives to the religious paths of their youth, it's important to have safe places for seekers to learn, create and inspire themselves.

How have you managed getting physical traffic into the store?

We're on the busiest road in the area. Most people transit by to the commerce and academic centers located a couple miles each side of us. But we're something of a 'destination' store/center, so people make the trip for us. We have a large and beautiful sign that draws positive attention and will soon have a readerboard on it. We advertise in several print publications, online and using flyering and other local outlets. We've done radio commercials and television advertisements. Our clientele often hear about us from other people, which is our favorite type of referral. We also do many things other than just sell things in a shop. We host as many as 16 workshops per month, weekly yoga and movement classes as well as a slate of healing arts professionals who do their work in our two healing rooms.

When did you launch the website for the store?

We launched the first version of our site about 4 months before we opened. It was not an online store at that time, it just had a little bit of pre-opening information.

What made you decide to launch the clicks part of your business?

We've had a lot of requests for online shopping and we've done a little bit of mail order. We get a fair amount of distance business for our life readings from internet searches. The first version of our online shop will actually be a drop-ship situation with one of our larger vendors with a few of our specialty items, like high-end crystals, featured.

How are you choosing your platform and shopping cart?

I'm going to choose a shopping cart that won't cost very much and is easy to set up to start out because I don't want to spend a lot of money on what we're looking at as an experiment. If it seems like our store will get some traffic, we'll probably stop-down and get something a little more robust than some of the low-cost options currently being considered.

How did you begin marketing your business? How do you hope the clicks and bricks model will help the business?

See the above answer of how we get people in the store for many of our marketing techniques. We also do some festival and tradeshow vending as well as working with healers in the area to provide products they might suggest to their clients. We are hoping the addition of the webstore will allow us to move more product through the sales cycle and create a wider customer base.

How have you managed growth? Do you plan to grow?

We are growing steadily and find ourselves often with way more than we can do than we can physically accomplish. We've enlisted the help of some friends and family, but frankly, I think we'll have to have a better plan soon.

What are the best things you’ve done and the best learning experiences (some call them mistakes) that you feel you’ve made and learned from?

I think having a robust, professional website is a great asset for our company. We look big-time and we will grow into that image. I think people trust you if you have a well presented website, brand and a coherent corporate image. With an online store, I imagine this helps as well. I know a lot of e-retailers who have sites that have that 'home-grown' look and they have established successful businesses on the internet.

We are learning lessons everyday about what our customers want and how to stock our shop. Opening up to a wider audience will continue to teach us in this way.

The biggest lesson we learned is to make sure contracts are current and clear.